Hayek argued that support for redistribution was driven by emotions that had been optimally evolved for small, hunter-gatherer societies

TESI DI HAYEK SULL’ EGUAGLIANZA

The authors use surveys to measure an individual’s disposition to compassion and envy. For example, for compassion there are 11 items such as “I suffer from others sorrows,” or (negative) “I tend to dislike soft-hearted people,” and for envy there are questions like “It is so frustrating to see some people succeed so easily”. In each case there is a scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree.

L’ANIMO DI CHI CHIEDE PIÙ EGUAGLIANZA IN SITUAZIONI SPERIMENTALI

Compassion, envy, and self-interest independently predict support for redistribution in four countries with different economic histories and distributional policies

LA SCOPERTA CHIAVE DELLA SPERIMENTAZIONE IN LABORATORIO

It’s easy to be skeptical of survey answers (I prefer measured actions) but answers on questions like this have been shown to be predictive for a variety of behaviors and there is an internal logic among the answers that suggests real motivations and behaviors are being measured.

I SONDAGGI SONO UN MEZZO AFFIDABILE?

What makes these three items–compassion, envy and self-interest– interesting is that each of these can be understood as having evolved for functional reasons in the ancestral environment